To fully embrace the 4HWW lifestyle, you need to find something to do with all your upcoming free time. When brainstorming ideas, don’t ask yourself what you want or what your goals are. Instead, ask yourself what you find exciting. The first two questions are too vague and don’t steer you toward the right course of action. You probably want something, or want to achieve a goal, because it will make you happy. But happiness is a vague concept—at different times in your life happiness might be as simple as having a good meal. After a while, happiness can morph into boredom, and boredom is even worse than failure. Excitement is a much more precise objective.
Don’t restrict yourself to what seems reasonable or realistic. Interestingly, it’s actually easier to do really big things than moderate things. First, there’s less competition. Most people don’t think they can do big things, so they aim lower, creating a lot of competition in the low arenas. Second, a big goal with a big payoff gives you more energy and adrenaline. Small goals aren’t very exciting, so you’re not as inclined to put in enormous effort.
For example, when the author gave a lecture at Princeton, he challenged the students to contact three very famous people (such as George Bush) and get them to reply to one of three questions. Whoever got the most impressive result would win a round-trip ticket to anywhere in the world. The challenge seemed so difficult that in spite of the excellent prize, not a single student even tried. If someone had gotten even a half-baked response, they would have won by default.
The next time the author gave a lecture, he told the students about the results of the first challenge. This time, some of the students tried to contact the famous people, and plenty of them received responses.
If we don’t know what we want, we can fall into two traps: adhering to conventions, or trying to buy certainty.
The first trap is adhering to conventions. If we haven’t come up with an alternative to a conventional lifestyle, it’s hard to avoid it. As children, we’re allowed to dream, but as we grow up, people tell us to be practical and realistic. We’re told we should make choices that will allow us to live the conventional lifestyle of holding down a good job, starting a family, and buying a sports car. But you don’t want to be the kind of person who settles for boredom and the status quo. Becoming this kind of person should be scarier than anything else you might do.
The second trap catches us when we don’t know what we want. Until we figure it out, we decide to work until we have enough money to do anything and everything. If you haven’t decided on a use for your money, you’ll keep trying to get more so that when you do figure out what you want, you’ll have enough. You’re trying to use money to buy certainty. For example, the author’s company, BrainQUICKEN LLC, reached a point where it could run itself without any input for him. However, because he hadn’t come up with anything to do with his time, he kept working even though he didn’t need to.
“Dreamlining” is a method for attaching timelines to dreams. It’s similar to goal-setting but differs in these ways:
There are seven steps to dreamlining:
1. Brainstorm dreams. Create two lists, one for a six-month timeline, one for 12-month. (The author sets even shorter timelines for himself, from three to six months, because the farther you try to project into the future, the more likely you are to procrastinate.) List up to five things you want to have, five you want to be, and five you want to do in each of those time periods. Don’t worry about how you would get any of these things; just focus on what you want. And be honest—don’t put things that would make you look good that you don’t actually want (for example, discovering the cure for cancer). If you get stuck:
2. Transform the “to be” list into to-dos by finding a specific action that would demonstrate what you’ve become.
3. Prioritize your dreams. On the six-month list, choose your four most important and exciting dreams from all the columns. Do the same on the 12-month list.
4. Do some math: figure out the monthly cost of each of the four most important dreams (cost for classes, rent, and so on.). Think of things in terms of a monthly cost rather than a total cost. You can use the calculator on the author’s website to help.
5. Do some more math: calculate your “Target Monthly Income (TMI).” Add up the monthly cost for each of your four dreams and add an extra 30% for safety or savings. This number is your TMI. You can also calculate your daily income. Probably, the amount is lower than you think, and it’ll lower further as you choose more things to do rather than things to have.
6. Come up with three steps to achieve each of your four dreams. The three steps don’t have to get you all the way to the goal; they’re simply designed to get you making progress. Your steps should be simple (doable in less than 5 minutes) and clearly defined. Step 1 should be doable right now, step 2, tomorrow, and step 3, the day after. The “tomorrow” and “next day” actions should be completed before 11 am on those days.
7. Do all the first steps right now. If you don’t do this step right now, you’ll put it off, and once you’ve done that, you’ll never do it. Use guilt to make yourself take steps—if you set a meeting with someone, you’ll feel bad about canceling it.